1. Combe House Hotel
This may be the perfect country house hotel and it's completely unstuffy - you're positively encouraged to loll about in the library nibbling plates of salmon (smoked in Dartmouth), or to lounge on the terrace overlooking the wildflower meadow and glugging Pimm's. The rooms in the 16th-century house are beautiful - the Linen suite has an eminently shareable 6ft copper bath. However, the real draw is the food: award-winning chefs Hadleigh Barrett and Stuart Brown use salad leaves and herbs grown in the kitchen gardens, meat and vegetables come from nearby farms, and they make their own bread and honey. Go before summer's out and try the marinated langoustine and crab salad, then Gatcombe lamb, and some West Country cheeses if you're not utterly stuffed.
Rebecca Seal
· Gittisham, Honiton, 01404 540 400, www.thishotel.com
2. Hotel Endsleigh
Not an inch of chintz anywhere; no 'curtain treatments' or pelmets but some seriously good art, especially sculpture heads and busts, from classical to contemporary. The bathrooms are to die for - huge freestanding baths, power showers with dinner-plate rose heads, fabulous white Frette towels and bathrobes. There are blazing log fires everywhere and at night the house twinkles with more than 100 candles. Endsleigh is a hotel designed for grown-ups who can be trusted to help themselves to drinks at the honour bar, to cream tea in the library, to Hunter wellies from the racks in the corridor. In return, all that is required is that you should relax (the feel is very much like its sister hotel, the Tresanton in Cornwall). Non-residents are welcome for lunch, tea or dinner, with such delights as Devon ruby red beef, roast scallops with lentils and rhubarb sorbet.
· Milton Abbot, Tavistock, 01822 870 000, www.hotelendsleigh.com
3. Percy's
If you are driving around Devon on a Sunday, looking for a traditional roast with all the trimmings, then don't go to Percy's. Who needs roast beef when what arrives on your plate consists of Percy's freshest organic vegetables and salad plucked from their vegetable garden, seasoned with their own fresh herbs, served with organic meat reared on their farm, perhaps sprinkled with a few mushrooms picked from their woodland? Lunch can often turn into a day out. There are 130 acres of stunning hills to explore, you can visit the pigs, help with bottle-feeding during lambing season, or just sit at a table watching the chickens and the grazing horses. They serve only the most exceptional quality ingredients and it's totally organic. The peaceful, pretty hotel is set away from the restaurant in a 17th-century former granary.
Lucy Siegle
· Coombeshead Estate, Virginstow, 01409 211236, www.percys.co.uk
